Lesson Tag: Rosebud Ben-Oni

Today, we will be looking at Writing Personal Loss as a point of Departure, and two very different poems in depth. Rather than think of departure as an ending, I’d like to delve into the idea of departure itself, and see what can grow from it. Think of all the people who are no longer in your life and the various circumstances surrounding each situation. How did these departures change or affect you? How did they point you in new directions whether in your work or in your actual life?

Reading

“Elegy” by Natasha Trethewey

Traditionally, an elegy is a poem of serious reflection, usually a lament for the dead. Interestingly enough, Trethewey’s father was alive when she wrote this elegy; in real life, he had not actually departed the physical world. Does this change your reading of the poem, esp the lines “Your daughter,/I was that ruthless”? What might it say about Trethewey and her father? What themes do you see in this poem? Read the story behind Trethewey’s poem here.

 

“What Work Is” by Phillip Levine

Is this a poem about work? And if so, what different kinds of work? How does the theme of work touch on his relationship with the speaker’s brother? Also, pay attention to the addressed, to the “you” in the poem. How does this “you” change? By the end of the poem, who is the “you?” What or who is the speaker losing/has lost/in danger of losing? How does this shape the poem? Hear Levine read the poem here.

 

Please read and listen to the NPR podcast “After Loss, Turning To Poetry For Grief And Healing,” which highlights Kevin Young’s amazing project. 

Writing 

(1) For 1 minute, list the names of those no longer in your life. Make sure to time yourself.

(2) Assignment 1 verb and 1 noun for each name listed.

(3) Choose 1 of the names, and write in one sentence what you want to say that person. Say it from your gut. Don’t overthink it.

Write a poem addressed to this person no longer in your life. It can be an elegy, but doesn’t have to be. This is a very open assignment. The only requirement is that it addresses the person as if you are speaking directly to them.

 

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a graduate of the Women’s Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater in NYC. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review. Rosebud is the founding talent and voice behind “Evolving Origins.”

This lesson will be focusing on the idea of Homelands. A homeland is more than just a physical space in which one traces back her or his own roots. The idea of having a homeland, versus identifying one’s nationality, weighs heavier, particularly but no limited to those living in some sort of exile, be it physical, spiritual, familial, etc.

In his seminal work Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes that “[i]t may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity…human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.”

For Rushdie, the past itself serves a homeland in which we cannot escape, or see clearly a larger picture, the true picture. Our perceptions, our own truths, are created from wounds and skewed visions.

 

Reading Assignments

“Shadow Cities” by Andre Aciman

In his essay, Aciman writes that “I had come here, an exile from Alexandria, doing what all exiles do on impulse, which is to look for their homeland abroad, to bridge the things here to things there, to rewrite the present so as not to write off the past. I wanted to rescue things everywhere, as though by restoring them here I might restore them elsewhere as well. In seeing one Greek restaurant disappear or an old Italian cobbler’s turn into a bodega, I was once again reminded that something was being taken away from the city and, therefore, from me—that even if I don’t disappear from a place, places disappear from me.”

What do you believe Straus Park ultimately represented to Aciman?

Here are some poems in which authors deal with the idea (and often lose of) homeland:

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Blood“
Charles Simic, “Cameo Apparence”
Mahmoud Darwish, “Who Am I, Without Exile?“
Scott Cairns, “Homeland of the Foreign Tongue”

Writing Exercises

Writing Exercises for Your Own Exploration and Reflection

1. Free Word Association: Without overthinking it, list the first 15 words that comes to mind when you think of “Homeland.”
2. Now, list all the places you have lived. Even if you moved from a place at 6 months old, write it down.
3. Thinks about how some of those places have changed; use Aciman’s essay “Shadow Cities” for inspiration. Choose a few, and explain how or why they’ve changed since you’ve lived (or still are living) there.

*Once you’ve completed these exercises, review in depth your answers to all 3.

 

Writing Assignment for Submission

Using your answers from the previous 3 exercises, write a poem about homeland(s). It can be any sort of homeland– it is not limited to the idea of an actual space. The poem should be an exploration of how you define the word. NO LENGTH REQUIREMENT.

 

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a graduate of the Women’s Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater in NYC. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review. Rosebud is the founding talent and voice behind “Evolving Origins.”

Welcome to our first lesson! I first came to this idea of origins as evolving when examining my own: a childhood shuffling between two families, my mother’s Mexican family on the U.S.-Mexican border and my father’s family whom are, for the most part, Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. My mother herself converted from Catholicism to Judaism before I was born, and while I was raised in an observant Jewish household, the influences of border culture and my Mexican relatives continually made an impression on how I viewed the world. Those two very different geographies were never as simple as leaving for another, and this made for quite an often contradictory, sometimes explosive evolution of self as I negotiated more than just identity among my extended families. Uneasy, uncertain, devil may care: that has been my world.

After many years of looking toward the pasts of my heritages, I have come to the conclusion that origins are not past at all. Rather, origins are very much alive. Origins are a living thing, and often both a resolute and reactive manifestation of personal racial, ethnic, sexual and religious beliefs and ideas. And above all, origins do not exist in a vacuum; no matter how resolute our individual beliefs, we each react to the world and sometimes, we change, both ourselves and our own point of departure. In this case, do origins themselves not evolve, especially for poets?

This week we will focus on the idea of Belief. Let’s take a look at NPR’s popular series “this i believe,” which has published and produced essays on the idea of Belief, ranging from a 14 year old’s experience with Asperger’s Syndrome to novelist Amy Tan’s making peace with her belief in ghosts  to one doctor’s creed that “Health is A Human Right.” Feel free to explore the series, reading or listening to the different essays, before continuing onto the selected poems.

 

Reading Assignments

“Self-Portrait” by Adam Zagajewski As Zagajewski contemplates time and self, constancies and preferences, that compose his “self-portrait” at this point in his life, he ends on an examination of his own “childhood”/origins as  poet—not of “ocean” but “air”—and his growth as both poet and human.

“Creed” by Meg Kearney Like Zagajewski, Kearney looks at both the significant and seemingly minor details of beliefs that shape how she experiences and views the world. We are going to play with this idea, but with a twist.

Here are some more poems that explore the idea of belief in various ways: “Ships” by Tomaž Šalamun (trans. by Brian Henry) “On Living” by Nazim Hikmet “Zone” by Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. by Donald Revell) “Walking Around” by Pablo Neruda (trans. by Robert Bly)

Writing Exercises

Writing Exercises for Your Own Exploration and Reflection

1. Read or listen to 7-year-old Tarak McLain’s “Thirty Things I Believe.” Now, looking back at your own past (whether back to you own childhood or as recent as a year ago), list 10-15 things you no longer believe in. They can range from small to large in significance, and of course are not limited to religious beliefs.
2. Choose 7 out of the 15, and write 1-3 sentences explaining why, where and/or how you lost these beliefs. If you need to explain more for some, that’s fine.
3. Choose 5 out of the 7, and write 1-3 sentences how losing these beliefs has affected you as a person and a poet now. How are you different?  How has your writing changed? Again, if you need to explain more for some than others, that’s fine.

*Once you’ve completed these exercises, review in depth your answers to all 3.

Writing Assignment for Submission Using your answers from the previous 3 exercises, write a poem about belief(s) lost. You can focus on one of belief in particular, or you can write a poem more like Kearney’s “Creed,” exploring multiple beliefs.  You can also write a “Self-Portrait” in the vein of Zagajewski, and how losing certain beliefs has shaped you as a poet and person. And lastly, you can use any of the poems from Reading Assignment #3 as inspiration as well.

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a graduate of the Women’s Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater in NYC. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review. Rosebud is the founding talent and voice behind “Evolving Origins.”